Crossing the Line: A Personal Story

Whenever we are asked to discuss our marriage and what makes it unique, I am a little surprised because I don’t see it as being particularly different from any other marriage. We deal with the same issues; we tussle over finances. I am the ultimate tightwad and James is a bit more pragmatic in his approach to financial concerns. I love when he says to me, “What difference is that 10 dollars going to make in our life 10 years from now?”

JAMES: Our marriage is unique, the same as every other marriage. While that sounds contradictory, it isn’t. No two people are the same and no two marriages are the same. They are all alike in their uniqueness. Sometimes people think that because we are in an interracial marriage then we are going to be polar opposites on everything, the whole “opposites attract” thing. A favorite argument of people opposed to interracial marriage is that “fill in the blank” men or women cannot appreciate a “fill in the blank” man or woman like someone of their own race could. If skin color were all it took to keep people together, then divorce would only occur among interracial couples.

CHERYL: I think the one thing that does make us a littler bit different is the speed with which we decided to make our relationship permanent. We proposed to each other on our first official date. We had gone out only once before and that was with friends, so it wasn’t a date in the true sense of the word. Three weeks later we went out alone and made it official. We asked each other to get married, although James will swear that I asked him.

JAMES: (laughing) Cheryl asked me to marry her. Don’t let her tell you any different … Everything seemed to stop when I looked into the eyes of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Everything that happened in the preceding weeks became a distant memory. We were married two and one-half months after we first met. We married fast, which is no big deal to me. If it’s right, what’s the point in waiting years and years and years?

CHERYL: One of the most jarring difficulties we had as a couple happened a week and a half before our church wedding. We had a white minister who didn’t want to perform our wedding ceremony. Granted, it wouldn’t have made much difference since we had already been married in a civil ceremony, but the church wedding was for our families. It was important to bring our extended families together for the first time in celebration of our union.

JAMES: Cheryl called me in tears about that. I was very sorry I couldn’t be there then. I was still in the USMC at the time, stationed in Arlington, Va. I wanted to drive down there and confront the minister directly. I just wanted to know what his problem was. Fortunately, another pastor from the same church was very eager to marry us and did a wonderful job.

CHERYL: We knew very well what his problem was. That minister was a bigot. After I left the meeting with him, I went back to my office and prayed for him. I wasn’t going to let myself be consumed by the hatred that this man harbored. Having our wedding in that church was important to me. And having it performed the way we wanted it was important as well. I was looking through one of the bridal magazines when I found this lovely family medallion service written by two clergymen from Kansas City. It was filled with verse and scripture and is used to join families together. But little did we know that in South Carolina, in 1994, that we were breaking the law by getting married.

CHERYL: James wants to change the world and that’s the thing I love the most about him. He fights for everybody. But there are heated discussions in our house about everything from history to religion to politics to gun control. We agree to disagree.

CHERYL: Being with James has raised my awareness on a number of issues and caused me to take a closer look at society’s racial divisiveness. I had never thought about the racial categories on the census and other government forms because we each had a box that we could check. But our children didn’t. They aren’t “others.” They are biracial, black and white. Why do they have to choose between identifying with one parent or another? Why does the federal government feel that it has the right to decide what race they are based on some antiquated ‘Jim Crow’ notion that one drop of black blood makes them only black and not biracial? The more we thought about it, the madder we got. And the madder we got, the more we wanted to get involved and make a change for the better.

I certainly wasn’t blind to the difficulties that we would face being a biracial couple, but we didn’t let those difficulties cloud the feelings we had for each other. While my parents raised me to see past skin color and into the heart of a person, James wasn’t the picture of the man that I thought I would marry.

I was born in New York but was raised in a small town in South Carolina. The schools had only desegregated about two years before my family moved there. In keeping with the mindset of the environment that I was raised in, I fully expected to marry a black man. It wasn’t until I moved to New Jersey after high school that I saw a different world. I saw interracial couples that weren’t famous or rich, just regular folks. I realized then that my options for dating didn’t have to end with guys who looked like me.

JAMES: Before Cheryl, I had dated interracially several times and didn’t go into our marriage blindly with regard to race. Several girlfriends of different hues and age differences made this relationship a little easier. I knew what to expect. Public reactions to our marriage differ greatly depending on where we are. The majority of negative reactions we receive from black males in Washington, D.C, where we both work, for example, are contrasted by the majority of negative reactions coming from white males in South Carolina. It’s the same negative reaction with a twist on color and location. If you learn not to internalize the outside garbage, it loses a large degree of its importance.

CHERYL: James wasn’t the first Caucasian man that I had dated; I had also dated black men, Latinos and Asian men, too. The difference with James wasn’t his race but his belief system. He is out there really doing something to fix the problems and not just paying lip service. I know James eventually wants a career in public service and I tell him that he will be an awful politician because he really wants to do something, not just talk about doing something. We are also a blended family. I have a biracial son from a previous relationship. I think it takes a special man to be willing to raise another man’s child as his own. I discussed getting married with our son, Ryan, who was then 8 years old. He loved James as much as I did, so that was all I needed to hear.

JAMES: Ryan is my son, regardless of biological happenstance. Family is love, not blood.

JAMES: In spite of all of the societal turmoil, Cheryl and I live a settled and happy life with our children – as settled as it can be when you are raising a teenager and a toddler. We are currently discussing plans for a 10th anniversary ceremony to renew our marriage vows. I can’t wait to see her walk down the aisle again, with our kids there. The first seven years have been great. I’ve no doubt that the next 50 will be even better.